How do you know when to upgrade hosting to VPS or Dedicated Server from an SEO perspective?
-
From an SEO perspective, how do you know when to upgrade web hosting to VPS or Dedicated Server?
Added:
We have a Dedicated IP Address and plenty of bandwidth and disk space. We've done a lot of work on page speed.
What we don't need is slow-downs due to the sharing space. Our business is seasonal with much higher traffic for three months of the year.
I'm leaning towards moving it up a notch. What is the next level after this?
And yes, our web host just confirmed that some of the things I want to implement can't be done because we are on a shared server. He recommended going to Dedicated Hosting.
And finally:
If we want to be absolutely positive that shared hosting problems won't affect us, and to customize, and also to increase speed, dedicated server seems to be the way to go?
-
Before adding new expenses purely for a speed boost, I would suggest looking at your site with PageSpeed. It is a free add-on in FireFox and is also available for Chrome. The results will let you know what opportunities you have to improve your page load optimization. Some changes offer a noticeable and immediate difference.
Don't try to get a perfect score. Generally speaking, anything 90+ is fine.
If you are purely looking at speed, VPS + Cloud would probably be the ideal solution. I would specifically use Amazon's cloud service to start, as they charge you on your exact usage with no minimum. If you ever get up to $100/month in usage, you can then began to examine other services to compare pricing.
If you use a cloud, I recommend not only offering your images and video files, but all your CSS and Javascript files. Your users will notice the speed difference.
I also want to be clear you may be able to keep your existing shared server and make other adjustments, or change hosts, and be absolutely fine. A shared server often costs less then $100/yr, where a dedicated server or VPS + Cloud will probably be $150+ per month. It's a big difference.
-
Thank you. I have something to compare now and more choices.
-
For all of the issues you mention, I am leaning towards the dedicated server. I think the level of business that we do on the web justifies the expense, even if it may be "overkill" on our actual needs. But with Google looking at speed (which is in their best interest...), it could only help.
Customization and not having to share problems other websites may be having on the server are also in the mix.
Thanks!
-
-
Would you share your really good host's name? Ours got back with a quote and I think it is high, but his expertise is probably worth the extra.
-
-
OMFG I did not know this tool existed!!!! i have been hosting on shared accounts for years, and always wondered, but never knew. now i do. WOW!
I wish i could give you 2 thumbs up.
-
You are right zharriet, time to give your host a call
-
I did look it up and though I have a "Dedicated IP Address", I saw another domain hosted on the server with that same IP Address. It's not a bad site in red, but I thought a dedicated IP address was for one website only.
I also checked it at http://www.domaintools.com and we show up as the only one.
And our host did check it out, too.
-
All great responses
Here is a neat tool to see who is sharing space on your present server (it will also indicate potential 'bad' sites in red) http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/
Andy
-
I concur with the following advice given.
Nothing short of the cloud beats having 100/mbs download speeds.
On a side note, VPS cloud nodes have become the new rage. While cheaper than a dedicated server, here has been but one experience:
I went from a 8.4ghz 5.14gb cloud setup (14 nodes at VPS.net) to a local (to Seattle) dedicated quad proc with only 6gb ram. The second server is well over 40% faster than the VPS cloud.
-
Ryan has given a great answer. I have left hosting services because of speed issues. They had way to many sites on the server.
Then I found a really good host and never had a speed issue running lots of sites on several of their servers. My movement through their various plan levels and on to dedicated hosting was mainly the need for bandwidth. Speed was not an issue when I moved to dedicated but that gave me the ability to select processors and add memory which got my site really fast.
-
For the most part, SEO does not care whether you are hosted in a shared environment, VPS or dedicated server.
There are a few issues that can arise from a shared environment.
Issue 1 - shared IP. Many shared hosting environments have 200+ sites on a server. Often there are porn sites and other sites which may get blocked by various filters. The problem this causes for you is the blocking is often IP based. If you get a VPS or dedicated server, you will usually have a unique IP. You can also obtain a unique IP in a shared hosting environment.
Issue 2 - speed. In a shared environment any one site owner can perform an action which causes issues for the server. The server can become very slow, and stay that way until you contact your host and they investigate the problem, then stop the task which is causing the issue. Some shared environments work out well. They hosting companies have alarms and processes to prevent or quickly identify issues. In my experience, most hosts do not take enough preventative measures and sites suffer.
Issue 3 - customization. When you first create a site, your needs are often small and generic. Over time your site grows and you desire to add additional software. The latest and greatest software packages for a CMS, for example, may require more updated versions of the supporting software. You may also require a server setting to be changed. Shared hosts are almost never willing to make these changes as they affect all users on the server. In a VPS or dedicated hosting environment, you can make these changes any time you want.
In summary, if you don't have any significant issues, you can stay with your shared environment.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to stop UTM affecting SEO
Dear Moz community, We are a directory website and have lots and lots of UTM. This is crucial as we want to measure visits through Google analytics. Moz as a tool is fantastic because through a site crawl it can spot all our duplicate pages. Needless to say, due to the amount of UTM's on different pages, we have lots of duplicate pages flagged up. I ideal solution is still having the analytics capabilities of the UTM, but not affecting our SEO where search engines will realise it is not a duplicate page - we're aware it is the same page we just want to track the source! Your help is greatly appreciated! Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Eric_S
Eric0 -
Badges & SEO
Hello, Moz Community! We're working on creating an affiliate badge for events that make our best-of list and we're wondering: if every event website embedded the badge (could be as many as 70), would having the same image hosting URL for each one raise concerns with Google? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | EveryActionHQ0 -
Curious about quick SEO results showing up...
Recently, I did a couple of major SEO mods on our e-commerce site. Here's what I did: A. No-indexed hundreds of thousands of Search Results pages. B. Changed the URL structure for the better of our product pages. I literally made these changes about 3 weeks ago and I am seeing some very interesting results in such a short period of time. Here is one example. My product pages increased impressions by about 20% or so, but the real crazy thing is the increase in click through rate on my product pages. All of a sudden I am getting about a 95% clickthrough rate!??!?! Previously I was getting around 58%. Any ideas on this? Is it a normal fluctuation that goes away? Or can I expect it to stay or even improve? Thanks! Craig
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
E-ccomerce SEO conundrum
I work on the marketing for an eccomerce website. And lately we have been having an issue with the "wrong" page ranking and the right page "being nearly unfindable." For example the product bit o honey - there is a brand page, category page and individual product pages. We want the category page to be the top level bit o honey "hub" page and have placed all of the products onto it. We've written a nice description about Bit O Honey on that page and spent time running social campaigns around that page to try and get social activity on page as well. There have even been a few back links from blogs or reviews onto that category page. It also has the highest page authority among all of the bit o honey pages. But for some odd reason it is always the absolute last result among the 3 options when i search? In fact the only time I can even find it is if I type in about 3 sentences worth of text from that page and it find exact match. I'm really pretty confused as to why the highest page authority page with the most content, activity and link profile, would have the worst ranking capability among the three nearly identical pages.
Technical SEO | | Jonathan_Murrell0 -
Need help optimizing Windows IIS server for SEO
My web site, www.nhfinehomes.com, is running on IIS7 and I did read a great post on SEOMoz.org regarding how to optimize IIS for SEO in particular, redirecting URL's to lowercase properly. However, I lack the technical skills to do this and am looking for someone who has done this before that can consult on this. Can anyone help or recommend a consultant with actual, IIS SEO experience?
Technical SEO | | LinkMoser0 -
Parallax Scrolling & SEO
Does anyone know the impact of Parallax scrolling from a SEO prospective?
Technical SEO | | AlgoFreaks0 -
301 Redirects Not Allowed by Host
Not sure if anyone has an answer, but we have a client who has an ecommerce store with SBI! The client has a new site with a new store builder/host and wants to 301 redirect all of the old site's indexed pages to the new site. However, we were just informed by SBI! that 301 redirects are not allowed - even more, they don't even grant FTP access. Any brilliant ideas from anyone how we can get around this?? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | roundabout0 -
New Forum: SEO considerations.
We're going to add a new forum to our website. We don't anticipate very large volumes of users. I read somewhere in The Art of SEO that forums should be 'built in bbPress'. I'm very much a programming novice so I'm still trying to get to grip with the basics of forums. I'd be grateful to know the main SEO considerations (however basic) that I should tell my web developer who is building the new forum.
Technical SEO | | JacobFunnell0